Word: kanawa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...stand in line in sub-zero weather for opera tickets. We'd rather go out and buy that new Kiri Te Kanawa CD than open up this month's phone bill. We'll stay home to watch a Live from the Met broadcast instead of taking our chances on the new Arnold Schwarzenegger film. And even our beloved Mozart, Wagner and Puccini LP's are showing severe wear and tear...
Since 1985, when Leonard Bernstein's 1957 musical West Side Story was released with an operatic cast that included soprano Kiri Te Kanawa and tenor Jose Carreras -- and sold handsomely -- other shows have got the tony treatment on records: Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel (1945) and South Pacific (1949), and Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady (1956). Now, most impressive of all, comes Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's 1927 musical adaptation of Edna Ferber's novel Show Boat...
...recordings have been as musically successful as Show Boat. In West Side Story, Carreras' Hispanic accent was as wrong for the role of the New Yorker Tony as Te Kanawa's British inflection was for the Latino Maria. In South Pacific, the casting of tenor Carreras, in the role created by bass Ezio Pinza, was a bit of commercialism that necessitated transposing the part and ended up distorting the balance. Further, imagining the New Zealand-born Te Kanawa as an all-American Nellie Forbush was a greater suspension of disbelief than many listeners were willing to make. Yet My Fair...
Musically, the performance is just as diffident. No matter how often heard, the melodic freshets and torrents of Strauss's score should always flow, but under Conductor Jeffrey Tate's charmless time beating, even the famous waltz proves resistible. Te Kanawa displays her shimmering voice to some advantage in the first act, then fades away. As the bubbly chambermaid Adele, Soprano Judith Blegen is unsure of pitch and unsteady of tone, while Baritone Hakan Hagegard inappropriately plays Eisenstein as a staggering buffoon...
...MOST SUCCESSFUL MARRIAGE That of Giacomo Puccini and Kiri Te Kanawa; his music and her voice gave A Room with a View the year's loveliest sound track...